Happy New Year

I managed to stay up til midnight last night!   Whoopee, eh?

There were lots of fireworks booms but dense fog rolled in right at midnight, as people were trying to shoot them off, making most invisible.  That's sad because those fireworks are expensive.

I promptly went to bed right after.

Friday, Patches and Thunder will get tested at Heartland and then go off to their new home with an old friend I haven't seen in years.  She still has some cats she took in from me years and years ago, to foster then adopt out, but you know how that goes.  Sometimes they don't tame, or get sick or you just can't find them a home or you can't part with a foster.

Her property is cat fenced, but she has a few cats who scale the fence somehow, and come and go.  You know how cats are.

Holding the 17 has been difficult.  And after months of official retirement too!  I get talked into things sometimes.  I think it will work out in the end although after the one barn home that I was holding them for fell through, I had days of panic and depression over it, since I am not equiped to take on more cats, financially or with space.   We have made do, but it is a temporary make do as I pursue homes everywhere I can for the 15 left to place.

People helped however, brought over cat food, even litter and I got my HUGE electric bill paid, created by that severe cold that hit Oregon, but especially Albany and Eugene areas, for almost two weeks.  That was so unusual and has created cost issues for lots of people trying to pay electric bills for keeping warm.

The woman who adopted Dano and Sunny, the dead neighbor's cats, brought two bags of food and some litter to help.  She liked seeing where they had lived, too.  Was fun to show her where they had hung out.  They're doing good.  Dano does somersaults when petted.  It's so funny the way he does it.

So last year, the neighborhood lost old Jack.  One of these days the bank will put his house back on the market I suppose, probably sooner now rather than later.  Sure wish I'd get some cat loving neighbors, but not people who don't fix their cats.  Not those type of cat people.

Jack's three cats were old like him and so finding them a place after he died was not easy.  They were sad, after he died, and locked out of the only home they had ever known at the same time.  How terribly horrible for them.  They would cry at his door, begging to be let in, not understanding he was gone forever.

Lost my job last year too, my self appointed job that is, of rounding up cats to be fixed using Poppa funds.  It created a great sense of loss in my heart and vacancy in my days.  What would I get up for anymore?  Well, to clean litter boxes of the cats left living here, that's why, but after the morning cleaning, which includes litter boxes, washing and refilling water dishes, filling food, checking all the cats, then the morning sweep and mop, what then?   What then?  What now?

I suppose it wasn't that hard to coax me into helping late November with the 60 cats left behind because I have felt so useless and bored during the months since my job ended and the cats certainly needed help.  We have pretty much no resources where I live available to help cats, even tame ones.

I still tried to create precautions in helping, making the other woman agree I would not have to hold or place cats, that she would do that and my only help would be trapping the wild ones and finding places where they could be fixed if she scrounged donations for that purpose.

But it fell apart in the end, and I ended up holding these here for the barn home that never was.  Wasn't anybody's fault.  There had been a fire, more predators than they had imagined, and lots of frozen and ruptured pipes.  Along with the stress of moving to their new property.  Too much to take cats also at this time.

It wasn't much of a year---2013, that I want to remember much of. I don't like thinking about losing my job, my mission in life, but it was good that happened anyhow, because my car is on its last legs and I have too many chronic body injuries and no money at all.  Inevitible I guess.

All I have to do in 2014 as of right now at least is find 15 cats a home.  Sounds easy enough, doesn't it, when in some years I found over 400 cats homes, without money, without a venue, kind of ridiculously wonderful what I used to conjure out of nothing.  Have I lost my touch?  Maybe.  Maybe I'm just tired.

I thought I would lose old Electra or old Vision or both last year, my blessed old girls.  Vision is 20 now.  Electra, 15.  Instead it has been Miss Daisy, my beloved deaf girl, who has given me a great scare, getting sick with diarrhea that I could not stop.  A vet visit didn't help much.  I suspected coccidia along with an allergy to the Temptation cat treats, to which she'd become addicted.

In the end, with two doses of Ponzuril, along with no more cat treats, her stool is solid and she's already making gains.  Back from the dead is my baby.  She's 14, however.  My beloved silly optimist Miss Daisy.

I'm trying to heal my body also.  I pulled ligaments or tendons in both hips, doing too much work, on that colony, when too tired, even building that room/cage in the garage. Boy, am I paying for my overly eager nature now.  Healing tendons and ligaments is a long term affair.  And not very easy either.  What do you do when it hurts to walk, to sit and to lay down?

  I wake up in the night just crying out.  I went to the doctor finally, a pain doctor who gave me exercises.  They have helped the pulled leg muscle on my calf, but maybe made the issue with the tendons or ligaments worse.  I might be overdoing the exercises.  I even do butt exercises to try to help.  I remember bruising my heal a year ago, however, trying to get in shape, going on a long hike in very bad shoes.  Took four months to heal that injury, so that I could walk without pain.  In the end, what helped most was a $4 walking cast I bought at Goodwill.  Some things you can work out and heal and some things you can't and have to live with til you croak.

The car has had it quirks and problems.  Like the long standing oil leak, that became worse and worse.  It was on the very last day I could get cats fixed using Poppa funds, that the car nearly stranded me.  I was getting females fixed for some women in Independence who were also taking in a Siamese I thought I was just getting fixed for a N. Albany woman, but who then refused to take him back, threatening to have him killed if I did bring him back.  I had taken them the Siamese and was returning their fixed female when the car began making terrible clunking noises and jumping around the road.  I thought "Just let me get the cats delivered to their home, because then I'll walk if I have to."  It was terribly hot and I didn't want to walk 15 miles home, but I knew I could if I had to.

I made it home, then lost the car for several weeks, while the rear main seal was replaced, then transmission leaks fixed and the rear wheel bearing replaced.  The car is still running, but now it has new noises, bounces and clunks and I just turn up the radio because it's all I can do at this point.  I have loved that car.  It's old and tired out too, with over 250,000 cat miles on it.

I think it should be honored, the brave little Scion that could, the car that was used as a truck, a four wheel drive, even an amphibious vehicle that transported over 8000 Oregon cats to be fixed or adopted out.  What a car!  WHAT A CAR!

It should be bronzed into a statue.  I can see it, on its back tires, front end in the air, like a horse with its front legs pawing the air, head high, nostrils breathing fire!  That is my car!

People tell me how stupid I was to ruin my car helping other people and their cats.  I just smile.  Maybe so, I think.  Maybe so.

I never claimed to be that bright.